AD CAELOS

Doubt

I was reading chapter 17 of Exodus this morning. The people of Israel had already grumbled in the previous chapter about not having food — God gave them food; they grumbled in this chapter about being thirsty — God gave them water.

All fine and well.

But then I read the final verses of chapter 17 about the Amalekite people attacking the Israelites in the wilderness, and a doubt overcame me that this part was a true story. It seemed so, well, unbelievable — even bothersome — that God would magically use Moses’ staff to overcome the enemy on the battlefield. This account must have been a later insertion.

So I immediately prayed that God would forgive me. Before I could even fully form the thought, God told me not to worry — it’s ok, even natural, to doubt like that. I smiled to myself and then finished reading the story. It ended with this verse:

“The LORD will have war with Amalek from generation to generation.”

Curious, I googled Amalek. Who the heck is that? Well, it turns out that he was the grandson of our hairy friend Esau. His people, the Amalekites, lived in the area near Horeb where Moses struck the rock to water his people. But here’s a quote from the googled commentary that struck me:

“Amalek is the constant doubter, brazenly rushing to any sign of passion for holiness and cooling things down.”

That, sayeth the LORD, is the bad kind of doubt.

Source: chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/3942715/jewish/Who-Were-Amalek-and-the-Amalekites

Christian Marriage (Part Two)

Christian friends, if you have no conflicts in your marriage then something is wrong. Marriage is a “great mystery” — no relationship between human beings is greater or more important. It is spiritual partnership, sealed by covenant, for mutual sanctification, making us day-on-day more like Christ. Its end is to develop mature character. It is wonderful but hard: burning joy and strength, yet blood, sweat and tears, humbling defeats and exhausting victories.

A good marriage drives each of us to experience the gospel, the transforming love of God. You will see your spouse’s flaws to the bottom, see the other in complete nakedness. In the course of your life together, you will fail to do what you ought, want what you should, be who you should be. You will betray the other, will fail to love the other as you should.

But, with maturity, you will come to truly love your spouse more fully than you could possibly have imagined.

Source: The Meaning of Marriage by Tim Keller

Christian Marriage

Our current concept of marriage is a relatively recent phenomenon. It’s driven by romantic feeling, that wonderful experience of being in love. If you somehow lose it, basically if you’re not Romeo and Juliet 24×7 for the rest of your life, well you have a right — nay, an obligation — to move on. It didn’t work out, he or she was not the right one, I will now go find my true soul mate. Because I deserve that kind of love. Repeat until spouse number eight.

Another choice is just to pretend that all is well in Verona, try to fool yourself and others that there’s not a deep, life-sucking disappointment at the center of your life, settle, give up your dreams, rationalize. (I’m not even going to address here those who have allowed “marriage” to devolve into a mere consumer transaction).

Look, since we’re all big boys and girls, I’m going to let you in on a fact of life: No matter how hard you try, no matter how much one is determined to be Romeo to her Juliet, or Juliet to his Romeo, the feeling of being in love will fade. It may be six months, it may be three years. But it will go. There’s no getting around it.

There is another way.

True Christian marriage starts with the understanding that we are each deeply broken individuals in need of salvation. And while it’s true that marriage is in great part about raising the next generation, it has a more fundamental purpose: sanctification, of being made day on day more like Christ. We now find ourselves far, far from the land of daisies and chardonnay. In God’s plan, your spouse is your spiritual partner, picked by Him just for you expressly for this process of making the other holy. It’s a great returning. Needless to say, the business at hand is vitally, desperately important.

Sanctification means pain and conflict, of eventually turning over to God all in you that needs to be burned away — and there’s a lot there that needs to change — of responding with love and resolve to the challenges to your very being forced upon you by your spouse’s God-given differences. It can only happen if both partners are committed to following God’s will and to sticking it out in sickness and in health, in times of plenty and times of want. In other words, of sticking by the promises you made on your wedding day.

All of this makes what Navy Seals do look like a day at the waterpark. But what results is two beautiful human beings – “little Christs” who serve the Father – who in the process find (to their great amazement) that they love each other more deeply, and in a real, completely naked, and deeply joyous way than either could ever have thought possible.

Take that, Romeo and Juliet.

Photo credit: Ben Swayze, Zion National Park

What is the Gospel?

Understanding the Gospel starts by understanding that God is, by his very nature, both perfectly loving and perfectly just. Both.

If you want the real God, you can’t have just one or the other. It’s a package deal.

Here are the opening lines of perhaps the greatest poem ever written, Milton’s epic “Paradise Lost”:

Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful
Seat

In these thirty-eight words, Milton has summarized all of history: We were originally given everything we needed in order to live joyfully, in wholeness and love. We traded our happy condition for a lie, with tragic, cosmic implications. We have since lived a broken existence in a broken land east of Eden.

Justice could not let our act of disobedience stand. Someone had to pay. And someone did.

Enter love, which led God to take on human flesh in the form of “one greater Man,” who lived the perfect life we should have lived, and then died the death we deserve.

Justice served. Love wins. In Christ, we are restored, regaining “the blissful Seat.”

That’s good news.

Photo credit: Ben Swayze, 2013

Dostoyevsky’s Response to the Problem of Evil

From the literary classic Brothers Karamazov:

I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, of the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they’ve shed; and it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify what has happened.

Beautiful words, aren’t they?

Watch this.

No, this is not a “hold my beer” moment.

Anyone who knows me well is more than aware that I love Tim Keller, the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City. The guy is just so humble, learned, and wise. No one currently living — and I mean no one — has more significantly impacted my faith and my understanding of what life is all about.

If I could force everyone I know to watch the following, I would. Alas, I can’t. Will you please watch? You’ll be very glad you did.

The Problem of Evil (Part One)

In the last post, I asked whether you, dear reader, might even want God to exist. And I tried to provide some reasons for maybe why that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. I’d like to shift gears a little bit and get philosophical.

According Boston College professor Peter Kreeft, the only truly formidable argument against God’s existence is the so-called “Problem of Evil.”^[1] I’m going to spend at least the next post addressing it. But before we get into that, can we agree agree to put aside two common but unnecessary obstacles to thinking on this question?

1. Relativism. This is the idea that what is true for you isn’t necessarily what’s true for me. While helpful when arguing over vanilla versus chocolate, the idea is utter nonsense when you’re talking about whether a thing exists. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to say: “It may be true for you that the Sun is up there in sky, but it’s not true for me.” The Sun is either there or it isn’t. Same with God: He either exists or He doesn’t, whether we want Him to or not.

2. Science has disproved God’s existence. If God exists, He’s by definition outside the created order — and therefore not detectable via the Scientific Method. One would only find the idea palatable by bringing to the question an a priori assumption that He doesn’t exist. Which kinda makes intelligent conversation on the subject difficult.

^[1] Peter Kreeft, A Shorter Summa (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 53.

A Lord’s Prayer

Our Father in heaven, holy is Your name. May we utter it only in reverence

Continue to bring to earth the Kingdom You initiated that Easter morning so many years ago

May Your will be done here, as it is now and has ever been done in Heaven

Holy Spirit, this day, guide our steps that we may do the Father’s will

Give us that which will sustain our bodies, enough for today

We humbly ask that You forgive the evil we have done, just as we forgive all wrongs that have been done to us. No man, woman, or child owes us anything — we hereby release any and all such debts

Forbid that we should yield to temptation

And deliver us from the schemes of the evil one

It is in Jesus’ name that we pray

Amen.

An Invitation to The Inklings

We are a free online apologetics discussion group for Christians interested in deepening the imaginative and philosophical grounds for our faith. Our focus is primarily, though not exclusively, on the literary and philosophical works of C.S. Lewis, arguably the 20th century’s greatest defender of the Christian faith.

There are no prerequisites other than a love of reading and thinking.

We are set to begin our first session of 2020.

Here’s how it works:

Sign up in the comments section below, making sure to enter your name and email address. (You may also contact me via Facebook)
On Sunday, April 12th, 2020 (and going forward every Sunday), I will send out info on the week’s subject material — as well as a link to a video lecture
Starting on Wednesday, April 15th (and going forward on every Wednesday evening), we will gather from 7-8pm for group discussion via web conference
The plan right now is to continue meeting through early June, 2020

Week One will consist of a general overview. And Week Two will be on how we as humans create meaning from information. Both are setup material for C.S. Lewis’s treatment of love in his The Four Loves and Till We Have Faces.

If you want to get ahead of the reading, we will be starting in Week Three on The Four Loves. You might want to go ahead and purchase both books now, if you don’t already own them.

-Jim Swayze

Introduction

An avid outdoorsman, fly fisherman, and lover of Oregon Pinot noir, Jim Swayze was born and raised in Dallas, Texas, where he still resides with his dear wife, Cristi. They have four children (three boys and a girl, now mostly grown). Jim completed his bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and English Literature at SMU and his masters in Apologetics at HBU. In addition to C.S. Lewis, from whom he derives primary inspiration, Jim is also strongly influenced by Tim Keller, Allan Bloom, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.